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After the 4th of July game the Cubs were 11.5 back and had a 38-46 record they then trade their best pitchers and go into a tailspin before calling up the prospects. They went 7-16 in July after the 4th. The Cubs could very well be around .500 right now and around 3 to 4 games back from the 2nd wild card spot.

After the 4th of July game the Cubs were 11.5 back and had a 38-46 record they then trade their best pitchers and go into a tailspin before calling up the prospects. They went 7-16 in July after the 4th. The Cubs could very well be around .500 right now and around 3 to 4 games back from the 2nd wild card spot.

First, I'd rather have Addison Russell than be 3-4 games out of the second wild card in mid-August.

Second, it's not at all clear they would be near .500 had they held onto BPJ and Hammel. BPJ has pitched fine, 116 ERA+ in 8 starts. But Hammel has been awful, 64 ERA+ in 6 starts. Meanwhile, their starts have been mostly taken up by Wada 124 ERA+ in 6 starts, debuted Jul 8, and Hendricks 225 ERA+ in 6 starts, debuted Jul 10.

Now, maybe the former two are better bets going forward, but the results are what the results are. The Cubs are where they are right now with those fine 12 starts by Wada and Hendricks. I don't see how taking those away and replacing them with 14 much worse starts (in the aggregate), gets them 7-8 more wins.

The point is that the Cubs had options in their farm system already that could improve the team by a significant amount this season. Sure some of it was unknown and it is reasonable to keep some players down until the probabilities swing in your favor but the Cubs built a wretched team on purpose for this season, cast off the quality pitchers they did have, and then punted the rest of the season even though they had the potential to be rather good from here on out. All for Addison, another top 10 draft pick, and to pocket more cash.

I can understand trading Hammel away as he isn't going to be back next year so if you have to trade someone you trade him or you just cut bait on Edwin Jackson. Of course they won't do that because it would then be admitting that they failed horrifically when they signed him but that doesn't change the fact that he shouldn't be on the team. Outside of two pitching slots adding Alcantara and Baez are no brainer moves. Hell, they should have called up Bryant and Soler as well.

OK, since the trade, the Cubs have had 14 starts that would have gone to BPJ and Hammell, 12 of them by Wada and Hendricks. The Cubs have gone 7-7 in those games. In the losses, they have scored 0, 0, 1, 2, 3, 3, and 5 runs. Even prime Pedro wouldn't get them more than a couple more wins.

The point is that the Cubs had options in their farm system already that could improve the team by a significant amount this season. Sure some of it was unknown and it is reasonable to keep some players down until the probabilities swing in your favor but the Cubs built a wretched team on purpose for this season, cast off the quality pitchers they did have, and then punted the rest of the season even though they had the potential to be rather good from here on out.

I thought the point was that if they kept their good pitchers they would be on the verge of a playoff spot.

Snark aside, what should they have done to make this a not wretched team? With hot shot prospects in the minors at 2B, CF, 3B, and CF, with SS and 1B already locked down, what exactly should they have done in the off season? Which of those guys do you want to block by bringing in a free agent or 2?

Switch out Jackson for Hendricks and you probably got 4 extra wins right there. Giving Alacantara, Baez, Bryant, and Soler at bats over Barney, Valbuena, Schierholtz, and Lake is probably worth a win or two as well at least. Not raising the white flag and trading off your two best pitchers probably adds a game or two just by keeping morale up instead of having the team enter into a tailspin immediately afterwards. Heck trading away either Hammel or Wood and calling up Wade for either one of them would probably be worth a win or two as well.

Switch out Jackson for Hendricks and you probably got 4 extra wins right there. Giving Alacantara, Baez, Bryant, and Soler at bats over Barney, Valbuena, Schierholtz, and Lake is probably worth a win or two as well at least. Not raising the white flag and trading off your two best pitchers probably adds a game or two just by keeping morale up instead of having the team enter into a tailspin immediately afterwards. Heck trading away either Hammel or Wood and calling up Wade for either one of them would probably be worth a win or two as well.

Boy, that's some 20/20 hindsight you got going there. Other than realizing that Jackson sucks (which is obvious to anyone paying attention), and that Bryant should have been up by mid May at the latest, I'm not sure any of the other could have been justified at any time that it would have mattered. Wood was a fine pitcher last year, may be again, and is still relatively young (27) and under team control for 2 more years. Until this year, Soler hadn't played above A ball and couldn't stay healthy. At what point sooner than about right now do you justify bringing him up? Until this year, Alcantara hadn't played above AA, hadn't been any great shakes there, and had never played the OF. At what point sooner than when they did do you justify bringing him up? Until this year Baez hadn't played above AA, and he struggled early in the year. At what point prior to last week do you justify bringing him up? And I'm surprised you didn't slam the team for wasting all those AB's on perennial failure Chris Coghlan. oh, wait, that's because he's been pretty good, this year's Schierholtz so to speak.

Hindsight? You agree with me that Jackson sucks and that Bryant should have been up sooner. I've been saying since last year that Hendricks should be on the major league roster. That isn't hindsight that is foresight. I've never been a fan of Wood but I already said that I can understand the Cubs trading Hammel away since he wasn't coming back and in fact said the Cubs should trade him earlier in the season. I also stated in this very thread, though somehow you took away from that message that I wanted the Cubs to sign FA players this year, that I understand why the Cubs didn't have all their hot prospects on the ML roster at the start of the season.

Why would I slam the Cubs for giving Coghlan at bats? I'm perfectly willing to let the Cubs give anybody, including your grandmother, a handful of at bats. If they don't look lost, if they are getting results then they should get more, and if they do well in those at bats they should get more as well. I praised Lou Piniella for many years because he did exactly that. He' play the hot hand and he'd sit the cold hand.

Hindsight would be seeing something like some complete unknown like Matt Loosen getting called up and posting a 1.58 ERA in 7 starts and then saying that the Cubs should have called him up sooner. I'm not doing that. I've stated that the Cubs should have punted on guys that we know suck and or aren't coming back while they should have played their highly rated prospects who were at the time playing well and proving they should move up. To then look at what they did when in fact given the chance and extrapolating from that what the Cubs record might have been if they had done B instead of A isn't acting in hindsight.

Looks as if next year's top draft pick won't belong to a team from the state of Texas after all

I went to the Texas loss to Tampa Bay on Wednesday with a friend of mine who was sure that the Rangers and Rockies would start throwing games down the stretch to grab the #1 pick. I tried to explain to him why this wasn't really a valuable, or even a practicable, thing for a baseball team to do. He was unconvinced. "Nothing obvious," he said. "They could just start running slower." It was surprisingly difficult to argue him out of the notion that tanking to get the #1 pick was an excellent grand strategy.

I don't know. I just think your analysis of what should have been done smacks too much of knowing the unknowable. Dumping Wood for Wada? Wood has been lousy in the aggregate, but look at his game logs. He's been mostly up and down, not across the board mediocre. His RA since the start of the season go like 4, 1, 2, 1, 5, 3, 8, 5, 2, 2, 7, 2, 3, 0, 3, 3, 3, 4, 7, 7, 5, 4, 3, 1. At what point in that sequence do you just know that he will be a liability and it's time to dump him for an unproven 33 YO who has never pitched in the majors? The answer is never.

July 4th. Again, keep him and trade Hammel if you want. Either option would produce the same result. The jettisoning of a pitcher that would not have been good from that point on and replaced with a pitcher that would have been good.

Even with more reinforcements from the minors, the Cubs are in 2014 at best the fourth-best team in the division. They're planning to make their big push starting in 2016, and given the state of their roster, that makes a hell of a lot of sense.

It seemed like it wasn't going to be Gonzalez's year from the moment the news broke on the finger thing. May as well shut it down and try to come back at full strength in 2015, before he gets hit by a bus or mauled by a pack of wild dogs.

Actually TerpNats "hijacked" the thread by making it about bad teams. The Cubs are the bad team with the most fans. Well, I assume the Red Sox fans are just depressed loners who don't want to talk to anybody right now.

(Seriously, a "player X is injured" story is not a thread that is going to draw any posts anyway. Unless he does it in some really stupid or gruesome way and then it's not gonna be about the team. For our deep, thoughtful analysis of the Rox FO acumen, find the Tulo-CarGo-Mets rumor/fantasy thread.)

I was jokingly complaining about the Cubs not playing badly. Now we're ticketed for the #6 pick or something when I had such hopes for the #1 or at least #2. Just another example that no matter how good management's plan is, it still comes down to the players not performing on the field.

I'm happy with the SRJ trade but McCoy's point that they could have washed out the back-end of the rotation to bring up Hendricks and Wada is legit and he has been pushing Hendricks for a while. And it was quite clear that the FO was gonna stick with the crappy 2B/OF situations, would continue to "find out what we've got" with Olt through the trade deadline no matter how poorly they performed nor how well the prospects performed. The 2014 Cubs could of course have won more games this year if they'd cleared out the dead wood earlier.

But fine, the strategy was what the strategy was, it's been that strategy for a few years now so I don't mind them seeing it through one more season at this point. And I thought they get very nice return in their trades this year.

On the Wood numbers in #17 ... that's what 5th/replacement level starters look like. Sucky pitchers don't suck every time out -- even Casey Coleman had quality starts 35% of the time. "Sucky" probably starts somewhere around 45%, certainly by 40%. (League average is 53%)

On Wood in particular,he's at 46% this year but 59% for his career so there's probably no point where I'd have pulled the plug on him this season. But a pitcher with a worse track record, I'd probably start re-considering options around 15 starts.

Note, you will essentially never have a large enough sample of starts to be "highly confident" that a pitcher's QS% is significantly better/worse than league average, you're usually gonna be better off basing it on component/rate stats.

The thing of it is is that the cubs by bringing up the prospects earlier could have gotten the best of both worlds. If the cubs don't win games they can still trade ml assets for prospects and have a shot at the #1 draft pick. If they do well the cubs have a shot at the playoffs and coffers get filled with more money. There really was no downside to bringing them up other than the all mighty service clock starts ticking and that is a stupid reason to do what they did. What is the difference in dollars between the 1st pick and the 6th? How many more tickets do they sell if they are winning and or exciting?